TWILIGHT
:
We chat with “Edward”!!!
By Christina Radish
 Since
its publication in 2005, Twilight, the best-selling first novel
in the romantic saga of mortal girl Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen,
has become a cultural phenomenon, catapulting 35-year-old Stephenie Meyer
to a level that most authors can only ever dream of. With a dedicated
fan base of all ages, genders and races, eager to see the much-beloved
story brought to the big screen, the highly anticipated film version of
the tale will come to life on December 12, directed by Catherine Hardwicke
(Lords of Dogtown, Thirteen) and starring Kristen Stewart and
Robert Pattinson, in the lead roles.
Taking time
out from his scheduled appearance at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con,
where thousands of fans screamed at the top of their lungs, during the
entire presentation, 22-year-old Brit Robert Pattinson (best known for
playing Cedric in the Harry Potter films) spoke to AGW about
playing a vampire already beloved by legions of fans, doing wire work,
and how best to approach kissing scenes. Gorgeous Robert seemed a little
shocked and freaked at all the sudden fan attention. We know it’s
just the beginning for him….
AGW: For those
who have been hiding under a rock or just haven’t discovered the
novels, can you talk about your role?
Robert: My
character is Edward Cullen, and he’s a semi-reluctant vampire, who
doesn’t really know why he even exists. He’s always thinking,
“I either want to die, or become a human because just being a vampire
is so utterly pointless.” He’s 108 years old, maybe 109. He’s
stuck in the body of 17-year-old school kid, pretending to be a human.
And then, he finds this mortal girl, Bella, and initially wants to devour
her. Then, it turns into an all-consuming love for her. It’s just
very difficult for a vampire to be in love with someone he wants to eat
all the time. The story is the problems, the trials and the tribulations
which occur when a vampire falls in love with a normal girl that he wants
to kill.
AGW: Don’t
you know that an immortal can’t fall in love with a mortal?
Robert: It’s
true.
AGW: Does
it end badly?
Robert: No.
Well, it’s arguable. Edward knows that he is a vampire and that
he always will be, and that Bella will always be a mortal, until she’s
dead, so there’s not a huge amount he can do about it. But, it’s
essentially a pretty happy situation.
AGW: Had you
read the book [or books] before being cast?
Robert: I
hadn’t, no. I read them after my screen test. I’d never even
heard of them before. Then, we were doing the movie and it got exponentially
bigger and bigger and bigger, and everybody knew about it, so it was kind
of strange and unexpected.
AGW: When
you did finally read the book, did you think, “Well, I’m really
beautiful, so I’d be good at this”? How do you live up to
the expectations with the character description in the book?
Robert: The
casting people talked to me and said, “Read the book.” I did
and I just thought, “This is really dumb. It’s just so pointless,
even going up for it,” which is what a lot of the fans said. [Laughing]
After I initially got cast, it was like, “He wasn’t even on
the short list.” It was really left-field casting. It is kind of
weird. I spent a long time, thinking, “How can I take the whole
beautiful thing as an interpretation?” I realized that it’s
just Bella saying that he’s so beautiful, and she’s in love
with him and obsessed with him. He could be a piece of cheese and she’d
say the same thing.
AGW: Stephenie
said that when she was on set, watching your performance as Edward, it
was just like the image in her head. Did you have conversations with her,
about the character, to make sure you were on the right track?
Robert: With
a lot of the stuff in Twilight, it’s very difficult to
see what Edward is thinking. He’s always hiding things from Bella.
When I read the unfinished manuscript of Midnight Sun, which
is from Edward’s perspective, that changed things and helped things
a bit. I just tried to think, “If you’d been bitten by some
guy, while you were unconscious, and then, suddenly you wake up and you’re
eternal, and you have super-strength and super-speed, and you want to
kill people all the time and drink their blood, when you were a normal
17-year-old guy before, and you wake up three days later and you’re
completely messed up, and then you go off and kill 50 people, it’s
like, ‘Oops!’” I tried to think about that, as a character,
rather than thinking that this is a vampire, right from the beginning.
I was thinking that he’s just a normal guy who got bitten by someone.
AGW: Had you
been a vampire fan prior to this?
Robert: I
wasn’t really a massive vampire fan, or anything. I like the idea
of them, and I like the way traditional vampires move. It’s nice
to play that. I’m not really the most athletic of people, so I’m
better with the slow movements. But, the vampires in Twilight
are nothing like other vampires. They don’t even really look like
vampires. They kind of do. [Glancing over his shoulder] Well, I kind of
look like a vampire in the poster.
AGW: Who are
your favorite vampires, from either movies or books?
Robert: I
like the original Nosferatu, Max Schreck. He was amazing. He had an amazing
face. I thought that was really cool.
AGW: Did you
do a lot of research on vampires?
 Robert:
Not on vampires, really. I guess it’s kind of easy to make it clichéd.
There’s so many hundreds of thousands of vampire movies. And also,
in this story, they’re not really conventional vampires. They don’t
really look like vampires, and they don’t die in the sun. Every
little characteristic of vampires is just abandoned. I was trying to do
it in as basic a way as possible. You just get bitten by somebody, and
then you’re a vampire and you live forever, and you’re super-strong
and stuff.
AGW: There
seem to be two types of vampires -- the nice, angsty ones, like with Buffy
and Lestat, and the pure, killing, evil ones. Where do you stand on that
issue?
Robert: Edward
tries to be nice to people, but not really. That’s what a lot of
the story is about as well. Edward is deciding to go against his base
instincts. He knows he’s a vampire, and he knows that what vampires
do is go around killing people. That’s the whole point in being
a vampire. In denying that, it’s kind of boring. If you’re
a human, you can go around doing whatever you want, at all times. I think
most people would choose to do that. And Edward, for some reason, decides
he doesn’t want to do that, and he’s trying to figure out
why he doesn’t want to do that, the whole time. But, I think the
vampires who kill everyone make a lot more sense.
AGW: It seems
like the Cullens would take more advantage of their “super-powers”.
Robert: The
Cullens don’t act like superheroes at all, which is really strange.
They have all these superpowers, but they just want to keep to themselves,
and that’s it. They just want to have as normal a life as possible.
Edward saves Bella’s life, and he could have saved some other people’s
lives, but he just doesn’t.
AGW: What
was it like to work with Kristen Stewart? What did she bring to the project?
Robert: When
I was looking at the book and I thought it was impossible to play the
character, I did the screen test with Kristen and I just really didn’t
expect the girl who was playing Bella to be like that at all. It just
drew something out. That’s why I really wanted to do the movie,
afterwards. It just felt really right, in the screen test. She’s
really, really good. She’s an amazing actress. She’ll be really,
really big. In a lot of ways, Bella is a damsel figure in Twilight,
but Kristen is kind of tough. It’s interesting because you see this
young, mortal girl having this relationship with, basically, a demi-God
and she’s a lot stronger, in a lot of ways, and he looks to her
for support, which I really liked. Kristen really has that strength in
her.
AGW: How did
you approach kissing scenes in the movie?
Robert: I
kinda just approached it from the front.
AGW: Very
funny.
Robert: [Laughing]
I always try to slip a bit of tongue in.
AGW: In the
book, it talks about how, when Bella and Edward are close, there is that
temptation for him to attack her. How do you put that into your performance?
Robert: The
more Bella says, “I’m not scared of you. You’re not
a monster,” the more Edward believes it himself, and he forgets
that he is a vampire and what his actual urges are. He tries to kiss her
and, obviously, it ends up being a nightmare. She has this hormonal rush,
and I have the “I want to kill you” rush. It ends up being
quite [hot], in a weird way. You’re at a point where you want to
do everything and kill them, at the same time. It’s the peak.
AGW: Were
there a lot of stunts involved, some work on wires?
Robert: Yeah.
It’s much harder than it looks. You would think that it’s
kind of easy to do because you’re essentially being pulled around,
but it’s very difficult to just even maintain your sense of your
center of gravity. You have to really fight against it, as well as letting
it do what it needs to do. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve
ever done. I’d done wire work in other stuff, but normally with
wire work, you’re just getting hit, so you fall over and it doesn’t
really matter what happens to you. Anyone can fall. But, with all the
stunts in this, we had to look good doing it, so it was kind of tough.
AGW: How do
they do the diamond skin [shimmering] effect in the film? Is that CG,
or was there make-up involved with that?
Robert: I
don’t know. I haven’t actually seen that yet. It is CG, but
I don’t know what it’s going to look like. That was one of
the hardest things to do. We tried 1,000 different ideas. We did this
thing with flakes of salt. We tried just about every single thing. I remember
that they painted one of the PA’s blue, which was kind of a confused
direction. He ended up coming out just with a blue head. I didn’t
really know what they were thinking with that.
AGW: And,
do you use an American accent, or your own accent?
Robert: An
American one.
AGW: Did you
find that challenging?
 Robert:
No, not really. I actually grew up watching American movies, so in a lot
of ways, it feels more natural, if you speak in an American accent than
if you speak with an English one. You feel like you’re acting more.
Otherwise, I feel like I’m not actually doing anything.
AGW: Is the
rain as constant in the movie, as it is in the book?
Robert: Oregon
has the strangest weather stuff that happens, especially in the spring,
when we were shooting. It would be sunny, snowing, raining and hailing,
at exactly the same time. Though it could be raining, there’d be
no clouds in the sky. It was like fake weather. Every two minutes, the
weather would change.
AGW: Since
this is your first time doing press interviews, this must also be your
first Comic Con then?
Robert: Yeah,
it is my first experience at Comic Con.
AGW: How have
you found all this craziness? Fans are screaming non-stop and they haven’t
even seen the film yet!
Robert: I’m
kind of terrified!
AGW: So, what’s
it like to be in one of the most anticipated films of the year?
Robert: Oh,
it’s terrible. [Laughing] It’s terrifying, in a lot of ways.
It is kind of exciting. I still can’t really come to terms with
it. It’s just strange. I’m always just terrified. I’m
terrified of everything. [Laughing] I don’t know why. As soon as
one person recognized me, I started freaking out. Even when people come
up, they’re always really nice, so it doesn’t make any difference.
But, for some reason, I’m just a good freaker-outer. I just freak
out, all the time.
AGW: Before
anybody had even seen any footage, you already had fans who are devoted
to you, just because of your association with this project. What is it
like to be a part of this phenomenon?
Robert: It’s
bizarre. You know that it is, essentially, because of the book. The book
has so many obsessively loyal fans. It’s strange because people
just immediately relate you to the character right away, rather than as
an actor.
AGW: How hard
is it to play somebody described as “perfect” and “beautiful”?
Robert: It
is kind of weird. When you read the description of him, it says ‘he’s
so beautiful, it hurts to look at him’. It’s difficult to
act that, so I wouldn’t really know how to go about doing it. I
hope there’s been a lot of post-production. [laughing] [Don’t
let him kid you. He IS beautiful]
AGW: How faithful
an adaptation of the book is the movie?
Robert: It’s
completely faithful. The only difference is that the action scenes aren’t
really in the book because the book’s written from Bella’s
perspective and, most of the time, she’s either unconscious, or
everybody’s moving too quickly, so she doesn’t know what’s
going on. All the action stuff is put in, so you can see it.
AGW: Are you
looking forward to being a poster on the walls of teenage girls?
Robert: I
don’t know. I like the [Edward] doll. The doll is cool! That’s
what I really want. I want to have a little button in the back, so you
can do stuff with it. I’m looking forward to the doll more than
the poster.
AGW: Has
the buzz on this movie generated any other offers for you?
Robert: Yeah.
Things definitely have changed. When the first trailer came out, I don’t
think anybody expected it to do as well as it did, but it got four million
hits in three days, or something ridiculous.
Pictures courtesy
of Summit Entertainment, LLC, 2008 |
